The beaker-lab-controller package still Requires cobbler, even though we don't actually use Cobbler at runtime. The only reason it's still there is because our docs tell users to run get_loaders during installation, to populate /var/lib/tftpboot with boot loaders. We should devise our own means of handling that instead. Some ideas: * Steal Cobbler's get_loaders script and package it ourselves. * Depend on syslinux instead, and copy pxelinux.0 into place (in %post, or on starting beaker-provision). Users will have to grab the other boot loaders themselves manually. The problem with this approach is that it would tie us to i686/x86_64 for the server. * Make users grab all the boot loaders manually.
Reproduce on beaker-devel: [root@lab-devel-02 ~]# yum deplist beaker-lab-controller | grep cobbler dependency: cobbler >= 1.4 provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-6.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-15.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-16.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-12.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-3.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-8.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-11.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-7.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-16.el6eso dependency: cobbler >= 1.4 provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-6.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-15.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-16.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-12.el6eso provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-3.el6eso
I think we can depend on syslinux on x86-based platforms, and beaker-provision can just copy or link /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0 to the tftp directory on startup if that file exists. So this is just a best-effort attempt at covering 80% of use cases automatically (x86 BIOS-based systems and virtual machines). We could then also add some docs to the section about "adding your system to Beaker", which would: * explain that you need a suitable network boot loader image in the tftp root * list the boot loader types we support, with suggestions on how to get pre-built binaries * also point at Cobbler's loader binaries as a convenience: https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler.github.com/tree/master/loaders This ties in with bug 1080285 (document layout of tftp root).
On Gerrit: http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/2994 Not addressing bug 1080285 for now.
Beaker 0.17.0 has been released.